Last week, Julio Merino published an article I wish someone had written ages ago: a fair, unbiased look at the differences between Windows NT in its original form and UNIX roughly at the time of the initial releases of Windows NT. Merino, who has a long career in tech and has made contributions to several operating systems, does a great job cutting through the fanboyism and decades’ worth of conventional wisdom, arriving at the following conclusion that I think many of us here will share even without diving into the great depth of his article.
NT was groundbreaking technology when it launched. As I presented above, many of the features we take for granted today in systems design were present in NT since its inception, whereas almost all other Unix systems had to gain those features slowly over time. As a result, such features don’t always integrate seamlessly with Unix philosophies.
Today, however, it’s not clear to me that NT is truly “more advanced” than, say, Linux or FreeBSD. It is true that NT had more solid design principles at the onset and more features that its contemporary operating systems, but nowadays… the differences are blurry. Yes, NT is advanced, but not significantly more so than modern Unixes.
What I find disappointing is that, even though NT has all these solid design principles in place… bloat in the UI doesn’t let the design shine through. The sluggishness of the OS even on super-powerful machines is painful to witness and might even lead to the demise of this OS.
↫ Julio Merino
You should definitely read the whole thing, and not just the conclusion, as it will give you some great insight into some of the differences between the two approaches, and how the UNIX and Windows NT worlds learned from each other and grew together. It’s well-written, easy to read, and contains a ton of information and details about especially Windows NT most people are probably not aware of.
Reading through the article helped my crystallise a set of thoughts I’ve been having about the future of Windows, and in particular, the future of Windows NT as a short-hand for the kernel, lower-level frameworks, and everything else below the graphical layer. I think there’s a major change coming to Windows NT, something so big and unheard of it’s going to be the most defining moment in Windows NT history since its very first release. There’s a few facts that lie at the root of my conclusion.
First, ever since the very beginning, Windows NT has been developed in roughly the same way: behind closed doors by a group of specialists inside Microsoft, and every now and then we got a massive dump of new code in the form of a major Windows release. It’s only recently that Microsoft has started taking a more rolling release approach to Windows development, with smaller updates peppered throughout the year, with different release branches users can subscribe to.
Second, despite many of us almost equating Microsoft with Windows – or perhaps with Windows and Office – the reality of it is that Windows hasn’t been the primary driver for revenue for Microsoft for a while now. In Microsoft’s fiscal year of 2023, Windows made up just 10% of the company’s total revenue that year, which amounts to $22 billion out of a total revenue of $211 billion. Azure alone is almost four times as large at $80 billion, and even LinkedIn – yes, LinkedIn – is good for $15 billion in revenue, making Windows only about a third more profitable than the most soulless social network in human history.
Third, despite Windows’ decreasing revenue share, the operating system is becoming ever larger in scope. Not only does it need to cover the literally infinite possible combinations of x86 hardware in both the desktop/laptop and server space, it now also needs to cover what is surely going to be a growing market for ARM hardware, starting with laptops, but surely expanding to desktops and servers, too. Microsoft needs to foot the bill for all of this development, and for how much longer can the company justify spending an inordinate amount of money on a massive army of Windows developers, when the revenue they bring in is such a small part of the company, and a part that’s decreasing every year, to boot?
Fourth, the competition Windows faces is surprisingly strong. Not only are macOS, Chrome OS, and even the Linux desktop doing better than ever, mobile computing is also competing with Windows, and that’s a space Microsoft is simply not present in at all. This is especially pressing in the developing world, where often people’s first and only computing experience is mobile – through Android, mostly – and Microsoft and Windows simply don’t play any role.
Given these facts, there’s only one reasonable course of action for Microsoft.
I think the company is going to address all of these issues by releasing large parts of Windows NT as open source. I base this on a gut feeling bourne out of the above facts, and not on any form of insider information, and there is a 99.9% chance that I am wholly, completely, and utterly wrong. Still, deep down, I feel like releasing Windows as open source makes the most sense considering the challenges the operating system and its parent company are facing.
You and I are going to witness Windows NT’s source code being published as open source on GitHub by Microsoft within 5-7 years, accompanied by an open governance model wherein contributions are welcomed and encouraged. Even if such a step will not be taken by Microsoft, I am convinced that, in the future, when today’s employees and executives write and publish their memoirs, it will contain a lot of discourse on the very serious consideration that took place within the company in the past to do so.
You can quote me on this. And then laugh at me when it inevitable turns out I’m wrong.
It’s a good description of the emergence of a design but I don’t understand the premise of this article, I’m no expert on such a broad perspective of an OS, but to me at least some of the “was versus is” seems jumbled. I suppose such a brief article covering such a huge subject can’t go too deeply into the why.
Also, I’ve never understood the concept of “Is better”, deciding an overall “Is Better” seems arbitrary, I supposed that is again my failing as I tend to default to a “fit for purpose” perspective.
Almost nobody will make use of a modern OS in the depth and breadth considered by this sort of review, most hardly make any use of a modern OS at all! Can the perfect tool ever exist?
> but to me at least some of the “was versus is” seems jumbled.
You are not alone here: if you take the whole Windows Bundle (kernel, OS and UI and user-space) then it definitely was never the best. If you take the kernel alone (who does that?), then it was certainly great — but still not the best?
It would have been interesting to get the kernel released under an open license so people can build OS and userspace around it.
Self labeling is all the rage these days.
Meanwhile, over on Microsoft-owned GitHub.com, there’s been at least one repo housing the source to XP for 4 years. What more could you ask for? What more WOULD you ask for?
Amusingly, there are several files that haven’t been updated since 1989, because OS design god Dave Cutler’s programming skills are humanity’s last line of defense against the transdimensional entity known as John Carmack. Go Dave!
> because OS design god Dave Cutler’s programming skills are humanity’s last line of defense against the transdimensional entity known as John Carmack.
Tipping my hat for those references! Well, played.
I really did not like anything about Microsoft. Part of my reason to build my own companies was keeping them Microsoft free. But I enjoy watching Mr. Dave Cutler’s video a lot and find it amazing how he makes this company and its products almost likeable. Although: if this man is on the spectrum yet, then I must be deep in 😀
Thom, thank you for this. I would love to ready many more articles like this one although I am less interested in corporate/ai crusades. Cheers!
Yes, and open source Windows would be interesting to say the least.
However one big problem with such large scale code releases is licensing. Quite frankly there are many parts of Windows that Microsoft do not own, and really depend upon.
And the parts they can, they would not want to.
There is still lucrative licensing for embedded and datacenter systems, and they actually license the “read only” version of the code to third parties under strict agreements. (One such had leaked back in the day, possibly the only public look at the Windows NT internal sources. Won’t share here for obvious reasons).
There are still more reasonable and achievable steps, though.
The ReactOS project is “good enough” for running legacy Windows NT applications, and even device drivers on bare metal.
The Wine project, and its derivatives Crossover, Proton, and Apple Game Porting Toolkit allow running Win32 API on UNIX based systems. (And I think there was an attempt to run it on Windows for better backwards compatibility).
The .Net runtime and APIs are currently open source, and allows cross platform development and deployment of backend and client software.
The Windows itself now comes with Linux kernel bundled for running 3rd party services like docker, almost natively. (At one point it was really native, as Windows NT microkernel had a Linux subsystem directly implementing the syscalls).
And possibly a few others I missed.
Overall, it would be an expensive, counter-productive, and revenue negative attempt to open source the Windows kernel. I would of course love it as a curiosity, but currently does not seem to make business sense.
An Open Source Windows would be great. I do not see that happening though. At least not until it is as irrelevant as DOS 5 ( still not Open Sourced itself ).
Is the core design of Windows NT really so innovative? I mean, a lot of it seems to be lifted from VMS which is no surprise given Dave Cutler’s involvement? The core architecture is very similar and a lot of the “advanced” features in the article stem from that.
By the time Windows NT arrived, it was simply implementing the GUI of Windows. Of course, the original Windows UI was just a dumbing down of the OS/2 Presentation Manager and IBM’s Common User Access guidelines. Perhaps the most “innovative” part of Windows NT was NTFS but even that was just HPFS ( the OS/2 file system ) take two. The Win32 API bears more than a passing resemblance to the OS/2 API as well.
The microkernel design was clearly inspired by Mach. The first release of Windows NT was 5 years after NeXTstep which of course implemented a basically BSD-like layer on top of Mach ( the same basic architecture still used by macOS today ).
The HAL was a good idea but not unique. Probably the best decision Dave Cutler made was to code NT in C rather than assembly. That too was a lesson from VMS.
I am not trying to dump on Windows here and especially am not trying to discount what a huge leap forward NT was for Microsoft. But, from an industry perspective, was it really technically groundbreaking? Like a lot from Microsoft, its main benefit seems to have been its success which, like a lot of Microsoft stuff, was from finding the “good enough” at “reasonable” prices sweet spot rather than being technically the best.
Before there was Inside NT, there was Inside OS/2 where Dave Cutler declared that OS/2 was the operating system everybody would be using in the future. I still have a copy of that somewhere.
NT was largely built on machines running OS/2. A more recent interview with Dave Cutler says they could not wait to get off it.
Can we give some examples of how advanced NT is or was?
Until the early 2000s, Linux copied a lot of kernel ideas from Windows NT. This video from Mark Russinovich from SysInternals fame is explaining.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdV9QuvgS_w
He’s a MS fanboy (and now a CTO there I believe) but it doesn’t invalidate his points.
After the mid 2000s, not much is in it apparently as both OSes had copied and implemented most elementary useful datastructures and algorithms.
There was a separate article about that but I can’t find it anymore.
Wondercool2,
Agreed. There are idea transfers in every direction. Sometimes this gets vilified, but I don’t think it deserves to be. Good ideas shouldn’t be monopolized, they should spread. I believe in copyrights, but developers should be allowed (and encouraged) to independently develop ideas. If they have common ancestry then so be it. Innovation is inherently collective, nobody should own it, nor be standing in the way of progress across the board. Those who would claim innovation for themselves are disingenuous about their own copying of ideas. Nobody operates in a vacuum.
When Dave Cutler mentioned they could not wait to get off of OS/2, I don’t believe it was anything directly against OS/2 itself (other than having to deal with IBM). He is a big fan of “eating your dog food” so the sooner they could move over to NT the better because that is the best way they could find and fix bugs.
It was both; he wanted his team to dog food NT as soon as possible. And almost nobody inside (or outside for that matter) of Microsoft thought highly of OS/2.
I read the Showstopper book and the disdain for OS/2 was universal among Cutler and his team.
Interesting. Did the book indicate his disdain for OS/2 was simply because of his intense dislike for IBM management (which he never hid based upon the interviews) or was there a technical aspect of OS/2 itself? OS/2 pre-version 2 was more of and advanced DOS (DOS with multi-threading) than an advanced OS itself. This is my opinion based upon my dev experience with it so take it for what it’s worth.
No. Cutler never worked for IBM, as far I know, so I have no idea where you’re getting that.
The disdain was mostly because the development teams inside MS were not particularly fond of OS/2 as a cross-development platform, and they also found the architecture to be another dead end. So they wanted it as little to have with it as possible, and found the compatibility reqs extremely constraining, especially since MS clearly didn’t see much future in OS/2 as a platform.
VMS and Mach were antithetical in their design. So which was it that NT supposedly “lifted” from?
Um…both, but mostly VMS. Also, original Windows NT was a more pure micro-kernel but a lot has been moved back in over time ( just as Linux is not really a true mono-kernel anymore ). If this is the “antithetical” aspect you are referring to, I think your analysis is a bit shallow.
https://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1509990#google_vignette
https://neilrieck.net/docs/dave_cutler-prism-mica-emerald-etc.html
In fact, Microsoft settled out of court with DEC over the similarities:
In fact, somebody from MIT found DEC code unmodified in Windows NT. So, I guess you could argue that Cutler started Windows NT at Digital and finished it at Microsoft. Does that count as “lifted” enough for you to drop this quotes?
Here is a quote for you “Last year, somone from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology apparently found whole chunks of Mica comment for comment, note for note still there in Windows NT. And G Pascal Zachary, in Show-Stopper, his 1994 book on NT, says that Cutler saw Mica as the rough equivalent of NT. The source described Microsoft as having been dragged kicking and screaming into the alliance, despite the fact that DEC was allegedly prepared to lodge a suit claiming damages of upwards of $500m to $600m. The alliance gave Microsoft a way to pay DEC off without appearing to. The settlement came to about $105m including the $75m Microsoft kicked in to bolster DEC’s NT service and support operation.”
https://www.techmonitor.ai/technology/dec_forced_microsoft_into_alliance_with_legal_threat
I love how the implication of “just 10%” is that it’s hardly worth bothering with! It still amounts to $22bn+
Windows, on its own would still represent a massive company. For that reason I don’t think it would ever make sense for Microsoft to open source.
If they ever decided it wasn’t worth the effort to maintain, they would sell it off and another investment vehicle would get fat off the profits.
If you think lotus notes sold for nearly $2bn five or so years ago, well past it’s popular peak. You can imagine how much the ongoing support contracts for Windows would be worth. Open source it, and that value disappears overnight.
Adurbe,
I agree. Although open source windows would be very popular and I see the good FOSS can do for society, it’s hard to monetize your software when forks can crop up any time to take a share of those profits. It’s one thing to say FOSS is profitable, but it’s another when your livelihood is on the table and you are the one giving it away. I also don’t know stockholders would allow it. Devs who struggle to make money can burn themselves out and are often dependent on some other source of income, like proprietary software. It’s noteworthy that the most successful FOSS company, IBM/redhat, have been trying to cut off the flow of source code to rivals. Going by past articles on the topic, it is a very hotly contested issue, so it’s hard (for me) to imagine why microsoft would voluntarily entering the position redhat are trying to get away from.
Redhat is a great example. Even the biggest FOSS org (with all the middleware and similar) “only” (there’s that word again…) makes $3.4bn.
What we’ve also seen from the likes of Apple (osx) and Google (android) is that FOSS OS alone doesn’t actually make the community happy.
And we saw from Solaris that open source doesn’t save an OS, it let’s the carrion pick at the remains and port them to other projects.
There is also the reality that no matter what Microsoft do regarding, it wouldn’t be enough, or it would be “wrong”
Azure and Office are the cash fly wheels for Microsoft now. I do not imagine the Windows guys are calling the shots over there anymore. As you say though, that does not mean it is not still a huge business.
The real value of Windows for Microsoft is not the direct revenue but as a host for Office and the influence it gives them in the Enterprise space. They will not give up that control without a fight. More and more, it is also a source for data. Recall must seem like Christmas come early for that crew.
Along with what is probably an IP minefield, I just don’t see them Open Sourcing Windows.
I strongly doubt Windows would ever be released as open source (unless Windows itself lost all its market share to either its Microsoft successor or a rival’s OS). What’s probably slightly more likely (but barely so) is Microsoft releasing a bunch of closed source libraries/binaries to sit on top of Azure Linux as a Wine/Proton-like translation layer (should be “perfect” translation in theory) and releasing that as a future version of Windows. Sorry, but neither scenario is likely to happen any time soon.
True, Windows isn’t an open source project in a traditional way, still gaining access to source code is rather easy. You can become a Microsoft employee or join program https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/ and so for individuals, customers, enterprises, governments and other partners access to source code is readily available. So why isn’t this code made public and is kept private, considering all these people and parties having access to it in the first place. Likely this is a cultural thing and strategic decision made in the past. On where Microsoft wants to keep tight control over Windows development, on where lets say they are prepared to develop an API if that is commercially feasible. On where with GNU/Linux some 3rd party develops the whole subsystem, or do a port to some architecture … as they find that feasible. Heaps apart in terms of progress being made. On the long run one can start to understand, on why GNU/Linux surpassed initially well positioned Windows. So in the future Microsoft could try to do what GNU/Linux does, as it’s successful at it, somehow i feel that at minimum cultural difference represent a strong road block and they are decades behind, such transformation could hence prove to be damning. So what is more likely to happen is Microsoft will more and more adopt GNU/Linux, especially on the Azure side for now and in next decade or two likely to phase out Windows completely. After all that happens and give it an additional decade, then Microsoft will likely release Windows source code to public domain.
What to open source inside Windows is a better question. IMO I find that Windows Explorer IS the culprit. Slow transfers, slow copies, unresponsive window, etc… It is just a mediocre experience. It used to be a real buggy piece of software in Win10 and before. Now? It is just slow.
My 2 CAD ¢.
I used to say (when I was working at MS), that they should open source Office. As long as third party versions were clearly marked (or binaries disallowed) they would lose few or no sales: commercial customers would not be interested in any case, and few users could devote months or years to getting it built with no support and missing non-MS owned features. They could justify it for PR, and even get the odd bug fix or enhancement for free.
Opening Windows has other problems: it would simplify working around all the obnoxious new features that they use to squeeze out more money
Microsoft Open Sourcing Office is harder to imagine than Open Sourcing Windows. For one thing, there is a huge risk if they Open Source Office that somebody embraces and extends them. Anyone could create a version that creates documents that cannot be properly read by Microsoft or that makes them constantly chase the new standard.
Are you sure Microsoft would not lose commercial Office customers?
If I was the CIO of a company with a 100,000 seat Office license, I would call around to my peers until I found 4 others to join me and we would announce the Open Document Alliance. For less than half of what we were already paying, we would create our own fork, support it, and probably host it. If I was a 20 – 50 seat customer, I would probably switch to the ODA version with confidence that it would be supported. I mean, it is not like I am getting any support from Microsoft other than updates.
It would be hard for Microsoft to move people off the ODA version because few people even need the features that people have never mind whatever Microsoft added to MS Office to lure people away from ODA. What we all want is compatibility and fidelity and ODA would have that. If MS tried to change the file format, they would be the ones with poor interoperability with everybody using Office before it was Open Sourced.
To me, this sounds like “IBM compatibility”. Once the horse is out of the barn, it is too late. You can add all the micro-channel you want but nobody is going to care. “Compatibility” means compatibility with whatever was there when we all gained access to it to begin with.
And if corporate interests did not do it, what about governments? The German government would not want their own version? China? I might petition my own government to standardize on an open version so that citizens would have a cost-free option for interacting with the government in document form. You might imagine fragmentation would be a problem but large enterprises and governments move slowly. Banding together may be a way to keep Microsoft from introducing breaking changes to the file format as much as anything. Perhaps Russia would want to create their own sanction-free version. Is the file format where we would want to innovate?
I think Office is what keeps people on Windows. So Open Source Office could threaten MS control over the Enterprise more broadly. Worse, other people would certainly start to compete to offer MS Office online and that could mean cloud revenue going to somebody other than Azure. Longer term, that is the biggest problem of all.
I just don’t see it.
Does anyone else suspect that there are dozens or hundreds of government/military/monopoly-related back doors and secrets buried throughout their code that would make it nearly impossible to open-source Windows without exposing their dark underbelly?
Or would these back doors be modularized enough so that this wouldn’t be that big of an issue?
You may be right but the Windows code is not “secret” even today. You can get access to it legally. What you cannot do is modify it and what you can for sure not do is redistribute it (especially not in binary form). It is far from Open Source.
If there was only a way to sniff your computer’s open ports and network traffic and figure out what it is communicating with. Sadly, that technology is impossible, and we will never know…
Xanady Asem,
Network packet capturing doesn’t necessarily prove the absence of a backdoor though. For one, even a clean OS install these days establishes many connections, some are encrypted and any of which could serve as a backdoor. We’d be none the wiser. Even if we could rule all of those out somehow, a backdoor may require an activation sequence that doesn’t reveal it’s existence under normal port scanning. Port knocking is a method by which owners can hide services, but it could be used to hide back doors too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_knocking
Even when it is recorded, data could be passed through hidden channels that appear as something else without a key.
https://www.programiz.com/blog/steganography-hiding-information-inside-pictures/
Assuming the adversary has AP/ISP/backbone access, their backdoor could disguises traffic end points and/or alter legitimate streams in subtle ways to establish low bandwidth channels while remaining totally invisible to a network admin.
I’m not alleging any of this exists in windows. What would the purpose be for microsoft? They already have a known backdoor called windows update that bypasses the usual OS security. I just want to point out that network traces can’t strictly rule out the presence of backdoors.
There’s no need for breaking encryption, you can easily check which ports are open and where the traffic from that machine is going back and forth.
Also it’s the most widely used desktop operating system in the world. It’s prodded and analyzed non stop, for decades at this point.
Xanady Asem,
Well, that’s kind of what I’m talking about. Just because you never see any data doesn’t mean the backdoor isn’t there. The backdoor could be idle waiting for an activation that you haven’t provided. And my 2nd point was that low bandwidth channels could be established over innocuous traffic that don’t raise any alarms. Assuming the adversary is capable of performing a man in the middle attack, even those with wireshark traces are non-the-wiser to the existence of covert channels.
Sure, but they’d have to reverse engineer the code itself. What I’m saying is that monitoring network traffic doesn’t 100% rule out backdoors.
Absence of evidence as evidence of presence?
Xanady Asem,
No, I specifically said “I’m not alleging any of this exists in windows…I just want to point out that network traces can’t strictly rule out the presence of backdoors.” In other words: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
I guess it all depends on what backdoor means and what the word is is.
Xanady Asem,
Is there a definition that makes what I said untrue?
If we assume the backdoor is simple and doesn’t disguise itself using stealth tactics on the network and inside the OS, then I’d agree that standard tools have a better chance of finding it. But in the context of the OP’s post I think stealth backdoors are part of the equation.
2015 says Mark Russinovich, that an Open Source Windows is really possible.
https://www.wired.com/2015/04/microsoft-open-source-windows-definitely-possible/
Then nothing happens in that way. And now it is possible again?
Nearly all other operating systems (including Apples operating systems, which fundament is called Darwin,with the xnu kernel) have an OpenSource kernel and other fundamental parts.
But if Microsoft making Windows open source, then they have either porting the Windows code, to compile it with an third party OpenSource compiler like MinGW or they have to OpenSource its Visual C++ Compiler and the libraries
Its C++ standard library they have already opensourced:
https://github.com/microsoft/STL
But VCRuntime, on which it is based on, isn’t opensource.
So there is a long way, until Windows is opensource.
I would be more interested in them releasing Singularity/Midori as OSS:
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-almost-ditched-windows-for-cloud-based-os
Those were toy OSes that never got anywhere serious. The dates involved suggest they would’ve had the same harebrained lack of discipline as Longhorn. Unless you plan on hacking on them, Redox is far more realized as a project in the same genre. Practically speaking they’re obsolete—on Azure, MS uses a minimal version of WinNT called Nano Server, which is memory-safe by virtue of simply being well-written rather than using VM sandboxing.
Hexadecima,
I feel the ideas behind Singularity are compelling. There’s no reason something like that couldn’t be well-written. A con at the time was that “managed code” wasn’t good at low level/real time/kernel usage. However today newer languages like rust have been able to replace run-time safety and GC with compile time variants. So I think it would be awesome to combine an OS like singularity with the compile-time safety benefits of rust.
Of course the main reason these research operating systems never make it very far is because they are incompatible with existing drivers and software, and not necessarily because they lack merit. WinNT and even linux are so far ahead with software and drivers that it’s unlikely for them to be replaced on a meaningful scale. Opportunities for new operating systems that don’t depend on the past are kind of rare.
I think people forget that the cost of Windows (Like in the enterprise I work in) has moved to thin clients in Asure. So we don’t pay directly for Windows anymore, we pay for access to Asure services that have Windows and Windows server, Active Directory, SQL etc.
Microsoft can’t and won’t open source windows.
Shoot we are still waiting for MS to Open source 30 year old parts of Windows so IBM could open source OS2 and that still has not happened.
Why would IBM need Windows to be opensource to opensource OS/2? Those are 2 completely different codebases.
At this point, with how much IBM has changed. I doubt they even know where the sources for old OS/2 even are
Windows owns the corporate desktops and that’s the entry door to many Microsoft’s products and services. Microsoft Windows is the reason that most of the world uses Office instead of WordPerfect.
Wow LinkedIn more profitable than Windows? That needs to sink in, esp for those that remember late 90ties. Nadela has really turned the company around.
dsmogor,
I think there are a few factors at play.
They stopped selling windows updates, which put a damper on windows sales. Also, the desktop computer market is mature and upgrading these days doesn’t make as big a difference as it used to. So customers, while numerous, haven’t been very inclined to buy new computers (along with new OEM licenses).
Microsoft aren’t giving up on windows sales though. The artificial hardware restrictions on windows 11 were likely implemented for planned obsolescence, a tried and true business method to increase sales from customers who’d just as soon keep using what they already had. Additionally, It’s very likely that internally Microsoft sees that public resistance to what I call “anti-features” in windows 11.. In response, microsoft’s decided to back-port these features to windows 10 despite the fact that the official windows 10 roadmap already declared windows 10 features finalized, the only updates are supposed to be security updates.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/windows-client-roadmap-update-april-2023/ba-p/3805227
https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-is-bringing-annoying-windows-11-start-menu-ads-to-windows-10/
It’s plain to see why microsoft made an exception to their official livecycle policy: it benefits microsoft while removing the customer advantages of staying on windows 10 to avoid anti-features.
Long story short, I predict these strategies will produce a greater increase in new windows sales than in past years when windows 10 gets retired in 2025.
For giggles: what do Guinea and The Bahamas have in common?
Windows at less than fifteen percent desktop OS market share:
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/guinea
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/bahamas … what changed there in September 2023?
For giggles, only because people love to ridicule Statcounter Global Stats.